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Blair turned Chequers into the London Palladium. It was stuffed with celebs, especially if they owned summer villas in exotic places. Many of the electorate are now waking up to the fact that we have been\ are being shafted by our politicians for a very long time. The fact that they are useless should spur us on to use the space they waste, and put it to some practical use.As suggested the many Grace and Favour residences could be used to house the influx of deadbeats our European neighbours are anxious to rid themselves of. Hague managed without his retinue of flunkeys before he moved in to Chevening. let him do it again.

Why should atheism stop evil going down any more or less than religion does? Religion doesn't stop evil, and in many cases perpetrates it. CVRs told of the 9/11 'pilots' yelling 'God is great ' as they plunged the planes into the buildings. The suicidal Egypt Air co-pilot of Flight 990 yelled the same thing as he plunged his plane and his 200-odd passengers into the Atlantic Ocean.

I would just answer these clichéd associations of atheism with evil-doing in this kind of vein. No atheist airline pilot to my knowledge has ever deliberately stuffed his plane into the ground screaming 'Atheism is great', or anything of the sort.

And the latest Krauss vs Craig debate has Craig justifying God instructing that Canaanite children be slaughtered because they failed to evacuate their homes smartly enough in advance of the chosen Israelites assuming possession. Craig is quite airy-fairy about it while Krauss is trying not to be sick. If God decides to do it, Craig argues, well that's fine. God has his godly reasons, and who are we to argue. And yet objective morality is contingent on the same God in authority. How do these people get away with it?

I swear that Krauss would've strangled Craig there and then but for his, Krauss's, belief in rational morality as opposed to Biblical psycho-morality.

Gavin - I mean no offence, but i really can't be bothered to reply to such nonsense. Please, please, read some of the previous discussions on religion/atheism. You could learn a lot from them. - I hope you now understand the sarcasm of my original comment. If not, I am prepared to explain that, at least, to you.

Gavin Wilson – the only evidence you have adduced thus far is of the danger of totalitarian regimes, which is not under dispute. To infer from the horrors of Stalinist Russia that atheism has such consequences by necessity requires a little more work.

'If you believe God does not exist then, as Dostoevsky says, this permits you to do absolutely anything.'

Inasmuch as there are no eternal consequences, yes. But then the promise of divine reward has caused its fair share of atrocities as well.

If only the Middle East could be cleansed of the evil of religion in an Arab Enlightenment.

As for your comments on Washington DC, it appears that both the Smithsonian and the National Parks Service are wrong as no mention is made of the city being laid out to defend itself against the people or of it being out of the way. "A Brief History of Pierre L’Enfant and Washington, D.C" is available on the smithsonianmag website and "The L'Enfant and McMillan Plans" is on the NPS website. Washington DC was only 16 miles from Mount Vernon where George Washington, who authorised the siting of the capital, lived.

My (Labour) MP has written to tell me that he voted against Cameron's initial call to arms against Syria. For his pains I have written back to offer him a polite and sincere "thank you", along with a suggestion that he follow the link I gave him to your Spectator article (above).

I have learned one thing about the fighting in Syria over the last couple of years and that it is not a civil war but a kind of proxy ww3,on one side we have Hezbollah,Iran,Syria Russia and china while on the other side are the sunni rebels supported by islamist rulers of Saudi Arabia,Qatar and Turkey aswell as most of NATO.The media should stop referring to it as a civil war,its a global conflict.
The Murdoch news group and most of the other media have been absolutely awful with this since 2011.

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